I noticed, quite recently, that this coming November will be the 40th anniversary of the release of the first “proper” album, ...If I Die, I Die, by the Virgin Prunes, a willfully difficult-to-categorize Irish band who emerged in tandem with the markedly-less-complicated U2, back in the very late `70s. I believe I first wrote about my adoration for this album back in the neonatal stages of this blog (which I shan't link to, being that it's a phase of this endeavor which I'm still embarrassed by), which I’m cleaning-up and repurposing here….
I didn't find out about the Virgin Prunes from my usual channels. It was the summer of 1986. I was working thanklessly as a dish-washer at a crappy "gourmet eatery" out in Westhampton on Long Island, scraping burnt croissant crusts off of baking sheets and basically being a surly bastard. Most of the kitchen was a bright, airy place...apart from the dish-washing area, where myself and a couple of other lackeys wallowed in damp, airless squalor, listening to `round-the-clock airings of Black Flag and Iron Maiden (after we'd disconnected the restaurant speaker which force-fed the rear of the kitchen tireless lashings of Sade, Swing Out Sister and the soundtrack to "Annie," as discussed here). It didn't pay especially well, but it was a job.
Every summer, legions of Irish kids would seemingly flock from Dublin to Long Island to snatch up waitressing and au pair jobs, and this particular establishment quickly became a hotbed of plucky lasses with adorable accents. One such young lady was a baking server named Fiona, who lived in a suburb of Dublin called Lucan. In relatively short order, Fiona and I became friendly (and I, in turn, soon developed a bit of a crush on her...to absolutely no effect or great avail whatsoever). In any case, she kept going on and on all the time about this gent back home named Guggi who she completely fancied (even though she allegedly already had a boyfriend who played in an excellently named band called Those Handsome Devils). Guggi was this chap who evidently sang in a band called the Virgin Prunes. Unimpressed, I sniffed that I'd never heard of them. And being that Fiona was otherwise obsessed with Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, I didn't imagine they were, as they say, "much cop."
So, I'm trolling around my usual network of downtown record stores during one of my weekly trips into the city (where my other job as an apprentice to a graphic designer kept me running all around town delivering mock-ups to ungrateful cosmetic companies) and I happened to spy an album cover emblazoned with the name Virgin Prunes. But....what's this? THEY LOOK LIKE SCARY, PUNKY, SCREWED-UP, CROSS-DRESSING PYROMANIACS!!! HOW COULD THIS BE ANYTHING BUT COMPLETELY BRILLIANT!!!! Clearly, no drab, mawkish Lloyd Cole-isms were going to be found here. Fiona's stock instantly rose a few more degrees, and I snatched up a copy of ...If I Die, I Die (great title, too!) on the spot!.
Despite not being able to get my head around what Fiona could possibly have seen in Guggi (himself of presumably indeterminate sexual preference), I was instantly intrigued by this mysterious band with the funny names, obscure language and pointed disdain for convention. Certainly a bit Bauhausesque, but Bauhaus never sounded this disheveled and possessed (except for maybe on "Stigmata Martyr"). As with many of what became my favorite albums of all time, this record literally has a sound that is completely all its own … or if there's another record out there like it, I sure as hell haven't heard it.
Meandering between creepy atmospherics and pounding caterwaul, ...If I Die, I Die is a primal, tribal, nightmarish YAWP of a record, and decidedly not right for every occasion (the album was met by a dependable chorus of "what the fuck is this shit?" by every college roommate I ever had). It's a lot to swallow in one sitting if you're not in the mood, but the single-y tracks (the positively jaunty "Baby Turns Blue" and the jagged "Pagan Love Song") alone are worth wading through the disquieting stuff. There are just some great moments here, from the ghoulish shanty of "Theme for Thought" (boasting the fiendish chorus of Die-d-Die-Die-Die-Die-d-d-d-Die as crooned by a drunken ensemble of evil Leprechauns) to the serpentine guitar stomp of "Caucasian Walk.”
Nothing ever ended up happening between myself and Fiona. She left at the end of the summer to go back to Lucan (and never wrote), but I still felt I got something great out of it. Subsequent `Prunes records didn't quite pack the punch of ...If I Die, I Die (though I later found a whole new appreciation for lead singer Gavin Friday's solo work).
Here in 2022, outside of the “Elder Goth” community (good lord, did I just use that term in earnest?), people here in the States mostly haven’t a clue who the Virgin Prunes were, apart from maybe invocations of their connections to U2. For the longest time, it’s almost as if the Virgin Prunes were this great little secret -– a rarified collective who made a handful of hard-to-find and equally hard-to-fathom records and then seemingly vanished. As mentioned on this post, when Gavin launched his solo career, I was immediately onboard, although by that time, he’d ditched the more theatrically confrontational aspects of his music in favor of a more refined, cabaret approach. There were a few posthumous compilations and import re-issues, here and there (I am not-at-all-ashamed to concede that I have bought If I Die, I Die… in various formats no fewer than four times, and still have all of them) and they even re-convened for an impromptu one off in 2009 (I missed it), but for all intents and purposes, all matters concerning the Virgin Prunes as a going concern were closed.
Or so I thought.
This past June, out of the proverbial (Baby Turns..) blue (sorry), my social media feeds were suddenly filled with sounds and images from the Virgin Prunes as part of a new campaign to advertise that unlikeliest of outcomes, that being that the entirety of the band’s brief-but-unwieldy five-album discography was suddenly available for streaming on a wide array of platforms. They launched a proper website, complete with news, video, a comparatively exhaustive bio of the band (so much for their once-beguilingly impenetrable anonymity) and the inevitable merch store (you can now, for example, procure yourself an official Virgin Prunes tote bag emblazoned with their frightwigged pates and thousand-yard stares). I was initially shocked to incredulity by the manufacturing of actual Virgin Prunes “action figures” until I realized they were just an unaffiliated artist’s novel one-off.
Having taken this unexpected step into the 21st Century (given that the original line-up had disbanded prior to the wider advent of the compact disc), will this dramatically change the fortunes of the Virgin Prunes? Will a new audience of attention-deficit-disordered teens now discover the harrowing charge of “Come to Daddy” or the disquieting list of “Heaven”? I kinda doubt it, but who knows? But if they start anywhere, they should start with ...If I Die, I Die.
Here, from that aforementioned website, is an compelling breakdown of how the album came together, as recounted by Gavin Friday himself.
Enjoy…
Recent Comments